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AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


GELETT BURGESS 








COMB WITH HIM? YOU COULDN’T HAVE MELTED 
HER OFF WITH AN ACETYLENE BLAST 








Ain’t Angie Awful! 


Being a Story of the Adventures, Blunders, Cap¬ 
tures, Distresses, Engagements, Flirtations, 
Gallantries, Hatreds, Ideals, Joys, Kisses, 
Loves, Marriages, Near-Marriages, Obses¬ 
sions, Passions, Quests, Romances, 
Sweethearts, Trials, Utterances, Vex¬ 
ations, Woes, Xasperations and 
Zeal, of one Angela Bish 


By GELETT BURGESS 

Author of 

Goofs, the Burgess Nonsense Book, The Rubaiyat of Omar 
Cayenne, The Maxims of Methuselah, The Maxims 
of Noah, Are You a Bromide? &c., &c. 


Illustrated by Rea Irvin 


DORRANCE & CO. 

Publishers Philadelphia 














Copyright 1918 JUDGE 
Copyright 1923 DORRANCE 8c COMPANY 


Jill righls reserved 
Published September 




SEP 15 


MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


©C1A752023 


/ 


> 


Acknowledgment is made to Judge 
for permission to use the illustrations 
of Rea Irvin 




CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Adventure of the Six-Cent 

Store . 15 

II. The Adventure of the Peanivorous 

Rit . 28 

III. The Adventure of the Fascinating 

Face. 38 

IV. The Adventure of the Mad Paper- 

Hanger . 46 

V. The Adventure of the Pink Panta¬ 
loons . 55 

VI. The Adventure of the Grafolion 

Company . 65 

VII. The Adventure of the Billion-Dol- 

lar Bill . 75 

VIII. The Adventure of the Dumb De¬ 
ceiver . 85 

IX. The Adventure of the Mozambique 

Monkeys . 95 

X. The Adventure of the Temporary 

Husband . 107 
































ILLUSTRATIONS 

Come with Him? You Couldn’t Have 
Melted Her Off with an Acetylene 

Blast . Frontispiece 

She Gave Him a Little Two-For-Five 

Smile . 22 

“Why Hast Thou Brought Me Here?” ... 24 

He Flung Wide the Portal. 26 

The Plumber, Who Cut Off Her Ears with 
His Tin Shears, Hardly Knew Her ... 36 

That Embrace Was a Revelation of Rap¬ 


ture to Angie, Who Still Had an Am¬ 
ateur Rating. 47 

A Leprous Bungalow, They Found. 49 

From a Roll of Green Cartridge Paper She 
Fashioned the Simple Robe in which 

She Fledded. # .. . 53 

Like a Fireman Feeding a Furnace His 

Knife Went Up and Down. 69 

It Was an Uneasy, Seasick Feeling That 
There Was Somebody Under the Bed 86 
Hardly a Proper Costume in which to Re¬ 
ceive Gentlemen at 7 A.M. 88 

Finding That She Could Ride the Harp 
Safely He Set Her Right to Work.... 98 

“Somebody’s Daughter Perhaps,” They 
Said, “Who Knows”. 101 
















AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


1 


Ain’t Angie Awf ul! 


CHAPTER I. 

THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX-CENT STORE 

I N the good old days when girls wore 
ears and lacquered their faces only 
in the privacy of their own homes, 
Angela Bish held the proud position of 23rd 
assistant gum-chewer in a six-cent store. 
Also, between times, she sold hardware very 
hard—such as cast-iron screwdrivers, tin 
saws, imitation hammers, and gimlets that 
wouldn’t gim. 

All day long behind the counter she stood 
on one leg or the other, and sometimes on 
all of them; and the longer she stood, the 
less she could stand it. 

Black was Angela’s hair, and her black 
eyes were black. Now some, says Confucius, 
are born with black eyes, and some acquire 
black eyes; but Angela’s ebon orbs were a 

15 



16 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


birthday present from her dear, dead, fat 
father. Angela’s dress was equally black, if 
not blacker; her finger-nails were all pro¬ 
nounced brunettes. But, in those days, all 
her thoughts were blonde. 

Angela thought, for instance, that if a 
man kissed her it would within four minutes 
be followed by a perfervid proposal of mar¬ 
riage. At this time Angie’s mind was not 
very strong. She was only thirteen years 
old, going on sixteen, and never yet had that 
funny face been kissed by mankind. Men 
had grabbed at her, of course, and even 
pecked at her lips; but no one yet had landed 
a base hit. Always she had struck them out. 

Here’s a little pathetic bit about Angie, 
now we’re on the subject. Timidly, in pri¬ 
vate, ofttimes she would take down a photo¬ 
graph of Fairas Dougblanks, and lick it 
lovingly. Did he respond ? Nay, he did but 
laugh at her—that same old lithographic 
grin. How cruel life can be, at times, to 
the working girl! 

Don’t you already feel, dear reader, that 
you know Angela Bish? Can’t you almost 
see her lack of any real womanliness? If 
not, begin the tale again, and this time 



THE SIX-CENT STOEE 


17 


please pay more attention. You may have 
missed that part about her crass brass 
bangles, her semi-diamond rings, and that 
hungry-sad Childs’ Eestaurant expression 
of hers. Did I tell you that her ears were 
pointed? Well, they were not. 

No one, in those dank days, had ever called 
Angie a Yimp. But that wasn’t her fault. 
Already she had got one job as a movie 
actress, but she was discharged because she 
hated having her photograph taken. Even 
as you and I she said she’d rather go to a 
dentist. Angie, in fact, didn’t know what a 
Yimp might be. Neither do I. But I think 
Angie wasn’t one of them; and I’m quite 
positive she wasn’t two. We both feel, don’t 
we, that she w T as far, far too young. 

A straight orphan was Angela Bish, yet 
the neighbors said she was always ’round. 
All that she remembered of her father was 
that, while he was only a few weeks old, he 
had died while trying, with considerable 
success, to boil his own head, believing it to 
be a turnip—a red turnip, which, in fact, it 
almost was by the time it was rescued from 
the soup kettle. The Bishes could eat no 
chowder that day. 


18 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


Her mother—everyone right here will 
kindly shed a tear—was a woman. Only 
a woman, that is all, and yet it is through 
such noble creatures that life and love are 
possible. Let us pray. . . . From this dis¬ 
agreeable old half-washed harridan Angie 
inherited her sex which was, at least, so far, 
female, and a wild old goldfish who looked 
like William Jennings Bryan in a globular 
' glass globe. 

But hurry, reader, hurry; don’t stop to 
ask why! We must get us back to the shop 
to see our lovely heroine hard at work, the 
arctic zone of that hairy head wondering 
how to kindle the ardent temperament of 
her customers. 

And especially she marked with indelible 
attention the pretty plaid Mister with 
purple spots and a beautiful half-burnt 
cigar who stood breathing puffs of pepper¬ 
mint into her fascinated face. How eagerly, 
when he picked up a hammer, she wondered 
how that would strike him! And when he 
turned with a sneer to the chisels and scis¬ 
sors she was in agony lest he should cut her 
dead. But six-cent cutlery is dull—as dull 
as our own (surely we may now call her so) 


THE SIX-CENT STORE 


19 


Angela Bish. The can-openers would have 
done far better to give her an opening. 

Her hero only bought a paper of one- 
ounce tacks to put in his friend’s dog food, 
and passed out of Angie’s }mung life. 

Xo, at this epoch, Angela knew as little of 
flirting as did the Swann Vivekananda, or 
Carrie Chapman Catt. For in those dull 
pre-tango days ladies wore low-necked 
gowns only in the evening; and, save for 
mere feet, they had no visible means of 
support. Men, to virtuous Angela, were just 
a queer kind of women who wore pants and 
mustaches and hard hats, who smoked 
cigars, and, if they saw fit, married one. And 
yet Angie, pure as was her heart, longed 
wildly to be wild. Every girl does; in fact, 
if not in fancy. That’s why they are called 
girls. 

We now come to the morning of Angela’s 
first adventure. Early was she awakened 
and cheerily by eight pounds of plaster fall¬ 
ing from the ceiling upon her face, neck and 
suburbs. As usual, the vaudeville team in 
the room above were practising the shimmy 
dance and massaging each other with their 
feet. It always bored Angie, this time more 


20 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


than usual. She yawned, rose and went to 
work combing the lime powder from her 
ears and nostrils. 

“Oh, I’m going to have good luck today!” 
she exclaimed, as the toothbrush went 
through the locks of her glossy hair. Poor 
child! She had found only seven cockroaches 
in the water pitcher. It takes so little to 
make a young girl happy! 

An aged egg she fried in a sardine tin, 
over a candle, now, and washed it down with 
a baked ham and the northeastern half of 
an English plum pudding with champagne 
sauce, left over from her frugal little dinner 
of the night before. For her dessert—only 
the candle-end; and you know yourself how 
tasteless candles are, without sugar. Next, 
after oiling herself all over with butter, she 
wriggled into her blue sausage skirt, and put 
on her hat. It looked like a cuspidor, but 
it wasn’t. Angela never wore them. 

Then it was that her great moment came. 
For years and years she had tried every 
morning, before the mirror, and every time 
she had failed. Today something seemed to 
snap in her—it must have been her con¬ 
science strings—and without the slightest 


THE SIX-CENT STORE 


21 


effort slie discovered that she could say it. 

“Damn!” 

Sobbing, half with regret, Angela knew 
that her childhood was over. She was free, 
free!—free to break hearts and pocketbooks, 
free to wear long red earrings forever and 
forever—perhaps afterwards; who knows! 
In the ecstasy of ewomancipation she drank 
half a bottle of cologne and smoked two 
whole Chinese punk sticks. She was free, 
free! 

Joyously she set out for the six-cent store, 
on the comer of 13th and 25th Streets, 
West. 

Who would have suspected that, diagon¬ 
ally above that little turn, there beat a heart 
filled with naughty joy? Back of those black 
eyes were thinks that would have made 
Rabelais weep. Yes, such was Angie that 
morning, if not sucher. 

And behold, at 11.11, again He appeared 
where the hard hardware counter concealed 
the southern half of our little friend A. 
Bish. Her hero! The same plaid suit with 
the same dear spots, the same half-smoked 
cigar, the same sweet old breath, embalmed 
in peppermint, as per always. 


99 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 



SHE GAVE HIM A LITTLE TWO-FOE-FIVE SMILE 


Over tlie top she cast her eyes. He caught 
them. 

“I say, girlie, how much are these?” 

“Can’t you read? Everything on this 
counter is six cents.” 

‘ ‘ What, every tiling ? 9 9 

“Yes, everything!” How simple are the 
truly great dramatic moments of life. 

A red light flared in his eyes. “Then I’ll 
take you!" 

For a moment, perhaps for only a jiffy, 
Angie swooned. Love’s hour had struck 
ONE! Then, ringing up his six cents, she 
gave a last look about at these to-be-forgot- 












THE SIX-CENT STORE 


23 


ten scenes of her infancy, and calmly wrap¬ 
ped herself np in brown paper. 

“Here you are, ” she said, firmly knotting 
the string about her waist. What she meant 
was , i 6 Here I am! ’ 1 But he understood. At 
such moments there is little need for words. 
One’s instinct speaks. 

In another minute he was outside the 
store, and Angie, trembling like a kangaroo 
with the flu, felt herself being carried down, 
down, down into the Subway. Then all was 
dark, dark! 

****** 

Three hours later, in a gorglorious apart¬ 
ment on the 101st floor of the Asdorf Wal- 
toria, Angela regained consciousness, al¬ 
though her brain still reeled with the stupe¬ 
fying fumes of peppermint and romance. 
Her hero was gloating over his happy vic¬ 
tim. Strewn about the room she counted 
several thousand cigar butts. 

“Who are you?” she murmured loudly, 
“and why hast you took me here?” 

“I am a manufacturer of tobacco ashes,” 
was his reply, “and I need somebody to sift 
them and pack them into silver cans.” 


24 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 




“WHY HAST THOU BROUGHT ME HERE?” 



THE SIX-CENT STORE 


25 


But life, dear reader, is not always one 
unbroken rosary of rapture. Not at all, or 
seldom. Some pearls are tears. Wherefore 
Angela’s virtue was to remain to bore her 
for many, many years. Hardly had she be¬ 
gun rapturously to fear the worst, when 
came a loud rap at the door. Her hero 
turned pale, but, hastily and yet resolutely 
donning a pair of purple suspenders, he 
flung wide the portal. 

Alas, there stood there, there did, with evil 
in his eyes, Mr. Burleson T. Woodrow, the 
proprietor of the six-cent store. 

With evil in his eyes he cried the one 
word, “Give her back, you robber! Give her 
back!” 

And, so saying this, he held before the 
Hero’s horrified gaze a small lead token. A 
little thing it was, small and round, hardly 
littler than a glass eye; but it had power to 
change Angela’s destiny. With one long, 
swift glance, she saw that her doom was 
sealed. Back she must go, back to the 
slavery of the hard, hard, hardware counter 
again. In one moment all her innocent 
dreams of vice had gefled. 

“Oh, dammit!” she whispered. 


2G 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 



HE FLUNG WIDE THE PORTAL 




THE SIX-CENT STORE 


27 


How little we know wlien a new accom¬ 
plishment may prove useful! 

For B. T. Woodrow held, in that large 
lobster-like hand, a counterfeit six-cent 
piece! 


CHAPTER II. 


THE ADVENTURE OF THE PEANIVOROUS RIT 

A NGELA was now only sixteen. But 
what does that matter, when one is 
young! She held a responsible posi¬ 
tion in a Swedish match factory. She it 
was who, when the matches were all finished, 
dipped the tips in water to make sure they 
would not light. 

Would I might describe her sloe-black, 
fast-black hair, her high-brow eyebrows, 
her nice cool high-school eyes whose 
pupils were always playing truant whenever 
she winked. But I see you are not listening. 
You want me to resume the offensive, with a 
capital offense. 

Well then, although Angie was as happy 
as a fried egg, her friend Conscience had be¬ 
gun to tell her, “You’re another!” 

For the Soul, beloved brethren, hath also 
its traffic cops, warning us at all life’s cross¬ 
roads, “GO” or “STOP.” But somehow, 
whenever Angie’s conscience showed green 
she was apt to see red. 

23 


THE PEANIVOROTJS RIT 29 


“Fat gentlemen with side whiskers,’’ it 
was now whispering, “who present young 
girls with popcorn and peanuts on the Ele¬ 
vated trains are nice, but naughty.” But, 
though he had his neck shaved, he was 
wealthy, and could evidently afford it. If, 
then, he choose to drop buttered popcorn 



and peanuts down the back of her neck, why 
shouldn’t she accept the gifts in the spirit 
in which they were given? For they were 
given in the very highest of spirits. 

Angela’s view of life, you see, was a little 


























































30 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


cross-eyed. She should, of course, have 
kicked him gently in the face and then called 
upon the handiest marine hard by to finish 
him up and spit him out the window. If 
she couldn’t find a marine—and sometimes 
one can’t, although they are the first to fight 
—she might, at the nearest jewelers, at least 
have got an aquamarine. 

But instead, she gave him a little two-for- 
five smile (you should have seen one of her 
large 85c ones, when she was lapping up a 
cucumber sundae!) and coyly mentioned her 
telephone number. It wasn’t hers, really, 
though; it belonged to the undertaker on the 
ground floor—and that was a funny thing, 
too, for Angie had often said she wouldn’t 
be found dead in his shop. 

One day the undertaker who was always 
undertaking people, undertook to call her 
down to the phone. Angie always hated to 
be called down, but condescending she de¬ 
scended. It was her fat friend; she knew it 
was, because she could smell peanuts in the 
receiver. 

“Say, meet me at the Ritz, will you, 
Peacho? Right away!” 

Angela frowned. But it wasn’t that, upon 


THE PEANIVOROUS RIT 


31 


sucli short acquaintance, he called her by 
her botanical name. It wasn’t that some¬ 
thing seemed to be stirring and moaning in¬ 
side the coffin on which she sat. It wasn’t 
even that the undertaker was listening, as 
usual, for he wasn’t; he was drinking as 
usual—embalming fluid. No—“the Ritz” 
—it was something that often happened 
when she tried to think—a sudden rush of 
mud to the head. 

‘ ‘ But what are rits ? ’ ’ she faltered. “ Is it 
a breakfast food, or something like a 
Yonker ?” 

“Oh, take a taxi, and ask the engineer. 
Hurry!” and he had hung up before she 
could say Jack Dempsey. She hadn’t time 
even to think of saying it. It didn’t occur 
to her till hours afterwards. 

She didn’t take a taxi, but a taxi took her 
to the hotel whose bills towered high over 
the adjacent roofs. There she paid the 
chauffeur— ’twas all she had—a compliment. 
The poor girl could ill afford it, seriously 
ill; she had now but two left, and no more 
coming in till Saturday! 

But she was going to meet a man! This 
time love’s guerdon would be hers! Angie 


32 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


thought a guerdon was some kind of a locket 
or lavalliere, perhaps even with diamond 
chips in it! 

****** 

We now come to the party of the second 
part—a rather entertaining Friday Night 
party, from 8 till 10. 

He w T as large and blond; rather blond 
than large, though he was large, too—too 
large. Tanned by the fierce tropical rays of 
the electric light, his honest, leather-beaten 
features and even portions of his face and 
visage showed him to be a strap-hanger of 
more than usual vigor—one who could step 
on a dozen feet at once, not including his 
own. 

In full view of the audience, he was eating 
eight peanuts, with nothing up his sleeves 
and a silk hat. As he ate, he breathed; and 
as he breathed, he ate. Long practise had 
enabled him to do both at once. But he 
couldn’t do both and be surprised at the 
same time. He had to stop something, so he 
stopped breathing—for lo, Angela was be¬ 
fore him, the love light in her ears. 

“Here I be!” she cried. It was a gram- 
matic moment. 


THE PEANIVOROUS HIT 33 


He gave her one look. But then, he was 
always giving her things. He had been gen¬ 
erous from the first. Not content with that, 
he gave her a cuff on the jaw. It was one 
of his best cuffs, too. 

“ You are late, girl! Come up to my room 
on the fourth story, the only story, unfor¬ 
tunately, with a happy ending. It is in the 
East wing, near the wishbone. Follow me!” 

Did it bode murder, or marriage ? Angie 
hardly cared. All she knew was that she was 
beautiful and desperate and slightly bow- 
legged; and heaven helping her, she would 
make this man her slave. If heaven wouldn’t 
help her, it would be hell. 

How they ever got up to the room she 
never knew—so why should I—or you? 
Perhaps they crawled up the mail chute. 
Perhaps they were carried up on a tray, 
disguised as two near-gin rickeys and a 
liverwurst sandwich. But they are in the 
room already and we’ll have to hurry to 
catch up to them. 

At last she was alone with him and two 
dozen mouse-traps. They were all arranged 
upon the bed, all different nationalities, 
though most of them were females. Why 


34 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


had he set a trap for her in this lonely place ? 
As both her hands were in her muff she 
could not shut her eyes and thus conceal her 
blushes. 

“Now here is my best seller,” he went on 
as if nothing had happened, which, in fact, 
it had. He displayed a small silver contrap¬ 
tion looking like the skull of a rheostat. 
“This is devised for the use of ladies who 
are afraid of mice. Just attach it to the 
garter, and it catches them on the way up, 
thus rendering it unnecessary to mount a 
chair or other quadruped. You, my dear, 
are to peddle them; you will have all rights 
north of Fifth Avenue. You have brains 
and temperament and freckles, and should 
do well. I have picked you out of the whole 
of New York, but I shall return you. Now 
here is another, a trap with a chain to be 
fastened to the wall, grand piano or any¬ 
thing heavy, like a mortgage, or afternoon 
caller. Ybu see, little one? The mouse, 
when caught, can neither pull the trap into 
his hole, nor the hole into his trap. You will 
work on a commission, say a captain’s, or, 
if you do well, a major’s.” 

But Angela Bish had a soul above mouse- 


THE PEANIVOROUS HIT 


35 

traps. She would catch larger game; and 
the wealthy peanut-eater, whose victims 
strewed the floor, not to speak of shuddering 
peanuts yet to be eaten, pale with fear, had 
the makings of a ke-husband. Her chance 
had come. 

With a scarlet cry she hurled herself into 
his arms, and, by the hard-boiled kiss she 
gave him he perceived, too late, that she was 
virtuous. Amazed, shocked, he wrenched 












36 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 



himself free and burst out of the room, 
weeping like a cow T . 

And alas, Angie, in her excitement—she 
had hardly known what excitemeant before 
—had sprung the trap, and behold, she now 
found herself firmly held by the left ear at 
the end of a long silver chain. Struggle as 
she might or might not, she could not es¬ 
cape. She couldn’t even get away. The 
room w r as filled with wails and peanuts. No 
one came. 


THE PLUMBER, WHO CUT OFF HER EARS WITH 
HIS TIN SHEARS, HARDLY KNEW HER 









THE PEANIVOROUS KIT 37 


To drown her sorrow she began eating the 
peanuts feverishly. 

* * * * * 

It was hours before they found her. She 
had aged terribly. The plumber, who cut 
off her ear with his tin shears, hardly knew 
her. But then, he had never seen her be¬ 
fore, and we must forgive him; besides, pea¬ 
nuts change one considerably, especially 
when eaten without a spoon. 


CHAPTER III. 


\ 

THE ADVENTURE OF THE FASCINATING FACE 

I T was Spring in New York. Don’t you 
just love stories that begin that way— 
or do you prefer Autumn'? It was 
spring in New York, nevertheless. It was 
Spring, also, on Avenue B. Indeed it often 
is, at that time of year. Bright red flannels 
were burgeoning on the clothes lines, and on 
the fire-escapes the milk bottles lent their 
vivid note of blue. Aye, it was Spring for 
kiddies and frisky puppy dogs; but it was 
Spring no more for the late Tom-cat in the 
area. Alas, he had not yet been removed by 
the Board of Health! 

What was Angela Bish thinking of as she 
gazed so perpendicularly out the casement'? 
Was it of love or lobsters, of lingerie, or 
Charlie Chaplin? No. There was only one 
thing Angie ever thought much about—noth¬ 
ing. She was thinking about it now. She 
had been thinking about it so long that her 
wrist was asleep. 

Angie was quite a young lady, now. She 

38 


THE FASCINATING FACE 39 


was a quarter to eighteen. Her feet by this 
time were fully grown, and in other ways 
she was getting a figure. Occasionally for 
a whole minute at a time her mouth was not 
ajar. Beautiful? Well, hardly that. Angie 
looked too much as if she had been packed 
all the winter in a trunk, with camphor balls 
to keep the moths out of her circulation. 
Still, if anyone liked that sort of girl, Angie 
was just about the sort of girl one would 
simply hate. 

The trouble was that nobody seemed to 
like that sort of girl. They wanted one with 
fewer elbows, and more eyelashes—one who 
didn’t boil over with frenzied yearning 
whenever a man passed her way. No one 
had ever made love to Angie, no one had 
ever even proposed. Angie always man¬ 
aged to propose first. No, Angie had never 
been hugged; she showed it plainly in every 
gesture. Yet she had the temperament of 
a mustard plaster. You see, if any man 
had ever hugged Angie, he would be hug¬ 
ging her yet. She would never have let go. 
But instead, he is hugging some other girl, 
less Angelic, someone with removable fins. 

All these things had made Angie a 


40 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


woman-hater. But what true womanly 
woman is not ? 

Angie had had no breakfast that morn¬ 
ing, Angie had not had, and she was feel¬ 
ing a little tropical in the inskirts of her 
equator. Late the evening before she had 
found, outside the inside of Delmonico’s, lo, 
a bill-of-fare, thrown out the window, prob¬ 
ably, by some bill-collector. Hungry and 
worried, she had devoured the whole menu 
from the date to the final period. ... It must 
have been the Chignons sous cloche that had 
disagreed with her. Undoubtedly the din¬ 
ner card had not been quite fresh. 

So Angie had to walk down town on an 
empty stomach. If it had been anyone’s 
else stomach it wouldn’t have been so hard; 
but to have to walk on her own—without 
rubbers—was very rough on a proud, sensi¬ 
tive girl, especially when slightly cross¬ 
eyed. 

A demonstrator of mackintoshes was 
Angie. All day long she sat in a red one 
and a happy smile under a shower of real 
water in a shop window, regarding the 
passers-by. It was a bit damp, the mackin¬ 
toshes not being really as waterproof as they 


THE FASCINATING FACE 41 


were advertised, but as Angie already bad 
water on the knees she didn’t mind it. She 
sat and just thought about zeros, and how 
soon she’d get married. How many, many 
husbands peered at her through the plate 
glass and longed for a wife as silent as 
Angie! But Angie never knew. If she had 
she would have burst a blood vessel. 

For this work Angie received two dollars 
a week and all the water she wanted to drink, 
free. Seeing so many men, she was never 
lonely. The only thing she disliked about 
it was having to sleep on the radiator all 
night; but she simply had to get dry enough 
to go to work the next morning, and after 
all, her radiator was one of the softest in 
New York. Every situation, however, has 
its little drawbacks anyway; even a Bank 
President has to get used to the drafts. 

Now r among the faces that stared at Angie, 
wondering if indeed she were human, or 
only a gently smiling vegetable, was one so 
covered with whiskers that at first she could 
hardly tell whether it was a man or a woman. 
But oh, those eyes! Angie thought them 
capital I’s. Gazing at them, she felt just 
as if she were going over Niagara Falls in 


42 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


a barrel. Then she would wake up to find 
her mackintosh was leaking in a new place, 
and she was only half drowned, after all. 

Now, to some, Love comes slowly, like a 
coat of tan growing ever deeper. But to 
others it strikes as suddenly as lightning, 
permeating one’s whole being like a sneeze. 
To A_ngie love came not only quickly but 
always; and, if denied expression it soon 
developed into convulsions which often 
proved fatal. 

The third time she saw The Face, Angie 
plunged through the plate glass window 
with a nice scream and threw herself into 
his arms. But, alas, he had already dis¬ 
appeared ! 

This depressed her; she felt like a choco¬ 
late eclair that has fallen into an ash barrel 
—that is, almost as bad—as bad as a vanilla 
eclair, at any rate. She would be revenged; 
she would find that Face and face it. Then 
she would woo him like a siren, onlv not 
/quite so loud, and when at last he was ac¬ 
climated to her vampire love she would sit 
on him hard. Perhaps, indeed, she might 
begin by sitting on him—it would depend 
upon what else he had on his lap. Any- 


THE; FASCINATING FACE 43 


way, she would make him suffer even as she 
had suffered, even if she had to marry him 
to do it. 

But where was the Face*? That was the 
interrogation point! 

For weeks she searched—but it was like 
trying to find a needle in a smokestack. 
There seemed to be so many, many whiskers 
in New York, but they never had that Cer¬ 
tain Something that made her feel so all- 
overish. She was, therefore, in no very 
gilded frame of mind when, one evening, she 
sat down on a Fifth Avenue curbstone to 
rest. She simply had to get rested or 
arrested—she didn’t care which. 

For a while she was so amused watching 
the children and old gentlemen getting run 
over by automobiles that she didn’t see the 
person seated beside her. Except for his 
eyebrows his face was quite nude. His 
hands also were naked, and he w^as thought¬ 
fully eating unsalted five-dollar bills. 

Such rich food might disagree with him, 
thought Angie; but she didn’t really care. 
One gets so used to gluttony in a large city 
that one takes it quite easily. And strange¬ 
ly, too, she felt no vertigo such as usually 


44 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


overcame her when she found herself in the 
same block with a live man. Her heart was 
broken. If only that Face were broken, 
instead! 

And still he said no word; his face was too 
full of currency. It was not till he began 
speaking that he spoke. 

“I am a stranger in Manhattan,” he re¬ 
marked, “and this is the cheapest and best 
meal I have eaten here for several years. I 
was enjoying it in my simple Flushing fash¬ 
ion till you came. But you have taken away 
my appetite. If you don’t return it, I’ll 
call a policeman.” 

No man had ever spoken to her so kindly, 
few had ever spoken at all. There was 
something, too, about the way he shoved her 
into the gutter that moved her strangely. 
But she was in no mood for flirtation, or, 
indeed, for anything mere. At another time 
she might have loved that man—in a gon¬ 
dola, perhaps, or an obbligato or an arpeg¬ 
gio, or, in fact, in any of those picturesque 
places you see in the movies. But it was 
not so to be. She heard only these cruel 
whiskers that had deceived her; she saw 
only that lying voice. 


THE FASCINATING FACE 45 


But already a policeman was approach¬ 
ing her on care-worn feet. 

Blushing to the roots of her tonsils, Angie 
fled, she knew not where. 

Hardly had she got there, however, when 
a sudden thought struck her like a falling 
safe. Wasn’t there something strangely 
familiar about that man—or was there? The 
way he had aimed his nose at her—the way 
he had sighed through his ears—what was 
it ? Or wasn’t it ? And if not, why not ? 

And then it all came over her and over¬ 
came her. . . . She stopped, looked, listened. 
But alas, two alases! He was gone. In acute 
despair she leaned sadly against a news¬ 
paper and began to weep—great, wonderful 
weeps. 

He, who had seemed so vice versa, was 
he not, indeed, by way of being The Face? 
She had, in fact, almost recognized it. Why 
w T hy, now! 

It was a close shave! 



CHAPTER IV. 


THE ADVENTURE OF THE MAD PAPER-HANGER 

N OT long did Angela Bish remain in 
her mackintoshes. She had tasted 
Romance d la subway. 

For two days, now, she had winked, in the 
199th Street Station, at a melancholy man 
in a slimy overcoat whose beard was full of 
big white blobs. He had smiled at her, she 
fancied; although, between you and me and 
the chewing-gum distributing machine, the 
red paint of which was being hungrily licked 
off by a half-starved tot, it may have been 
that misery, alas, too often draws only a 
smile from the thoughtless. 

Be that as it may, let us return to life as 
it is lived north of 11th Street. 

Angie lived on the memory of that smile 
all day; and at night she warmed it over 
for supper. Already life had changed for 
Angie; and, inversely, Angie had changed 
for life. 

The third day, greatly daring, she return¬ 
ed his grin in even better condition than 
she had found it. 


46 


THE MAD PAPER-HANGER 47 



THAT EMBRACE WAS A REVELATION OF RAPTURE 
TO ANGIE, WHO STILL HAD AN AMATEUR RATING 














48 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


Another instinct, and she was in his arms. 
Isn’t human nature wonderful, Gertrude? 
At one moment you are in heaven waited on 
by pink angels, and the next, some one has 
tried to borrow four dollars—and succeeded. 
And then, when your spirits are covered 
with green mold and infested with crawling 
things, lo, a friend appears out of Nowhere 
and offers you a position as companion to a 
beautiful and wealthy young French girl at 
a salary of $3,000 a month and cigarettes. 
Isn’t that true? Anyway, I’ll say so. 

But I was speaking, you may remember, 
of our foolish heroine. 

That embrace was a revelation of rapture 
to Angie,, who still had an amateur rating. 
How beardy his beard was!—and his hands 
were soft and cold and moist. At first she 
thought they were raw oysters. She had 
always loved oysters, always would. She 
was happier than she had been since she ate 
her first hair sandwich. Nevertheless, we 
must not leave her too long in the embrace 
of an imperfect stranger. 

“I have found you at last!” With diffi¬ 
culty the words came through the thick 



THE MAD PAPER-HANGER 49 


brown beard. It was he who spoke. Angie 
had no beard. She was far too young. 

“Just one moment to buy a toothbrush / 9 
she replied, “and I shall be Yours Sincere¬ 
ly.” And Angela smiled. 

Now there are smiles that make one, and 
there are smiles that make one blue. Her 
confession seemed to strike him funny, like 
a cranberry pie in the face. 



A LEPKOUS BUNGALOW, THEY FOUND 


Indeed, all the way to Harlem he seemed 
depressed; but then, they were going to Har¬ 
lem. Curiously enough the object of their 
journey is the subject of my next sentence. 

A leprous bungalow, entirely surround- 
ded by goats, they found, ramshackled to a 







50 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


high cliff overlooking an ash barrel. There 
Angie was pushed through the front door, 
and behind her he slyly turned the key in the 
lock. She was, in fact, locked in, if you get 
what I mean. They were at last alone. . . . 

Now many authors would make a good 

deal out of a compromising situation like 

that. But you scarcely need to know more; 

you also have a morbid imagination. Yes, 

as I have promised the editor to tell the 

whole truth, I shall not flinch from the 

facts. I shall tell you all—all. And I shall 

not even use asterisks. 

****** 

He led her to the kitchen, and he led her 
to the stove. There, pointing to a huge bucket 
of paste, “Fry this!” he commanded. “’Tis 
too sour to stick to the walls, and, woman, 
I must be fed!” 

Often, in future years, Angie was to re¬ 
member those miserably happy meals, and 
how, afterwards, a mutual indigestion drew 
them together. When at last the bucket was 
empty they munched scraps of wall paper, 
and their faces began to break out in spots 
of mauve and yellow, not to speak of else¬ 
where. It was a great satisfaction, however, 


THE MAD PAPER-HANGER 51 


to know that it was at least dining-room 
paper. 

Yet even then Angie was not satisfied. 
And finally, in her despair, she cried, “At 
least yon might wash your beard, O my love, 
and then when I kiss you perhaps I wouldn’t 
be so stuck on you!” 

The paper hanger was aqueduct to the 
occasion. 

Maddened by the world-old cry, “Do you 
love me? Don’t you love me?” he arose 
and pasted her over and over with layer 
upon layer of the most expensive wall 
papers. Then, when she was quite covered 
with the pink cretonne, he pasted her up 
in front of the back-parlor wall which was 
decorated with a similar pattern. There, 
thank God, she was for a while invisible, 
though still from her camouflage came weak, 
wan peeps of love. 

That day Angela did the hardest work she 
had ever done. She thought. And when she 
had clawed herself loose, her mind was made 
up like an Upper 7. This time he should 
not escape her! 

Hiding in the oven of the lofty range, 
where he had forced her to sleep o’ nights, 


52 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


she watched him enter and give a glad howl 
to find himself alone. Then, while he was 
absorbedly removing a wad of gum from his 
heel, behold, she sprang upon him, clasped 
him in a fond embrace—and clung. 

Reader, bear in mind that I expressly re¬ 
serve all emotion picture rights. The des¬ 
perate girl had coated herself from hair to 
heel with paste! It was sour but sticky. 

Alas, for him, there was now no getting 
away. Never had he found a woman so at¬ 
tractive, never one who could hold him so 
long. "When he had tired of them, he had 
always cast them carelessly aside. But not 
so Angela Bisli, the elinger. Proud as he 
was of his early struggles as a paper hanger, 
they were nothing to the writhings with 
which he now sought to regain his freedom. 

It was useless, of course, to appeal to the 
Supreme Court for a separation. They were 
not yet married. But, as he fought, an idea, 
bright as the Star Spangled Banner, car¬ 
ried him and equally her (Oh, say can you 
see them, welded together like two bars of 
chocolate in the dawn’s early light?) to¬ 
wards the bathroom! 

Before she had time to regret having left 


THE MAD PAPER-HANGER 53 



FROM A ROLL OF GREEN CARTRIDGE PAPER SHE 
FASHIONED THE SIMPLE ROBE IN WHICH 

SHE FLEDDED 





54 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


the faucets running after washing her 
switch and wrist-watch, they had reached 
the tub, which, like her happy heart, was 
now full to overflowing. And there, with a 
sudden noble resolve, the paperhanger, who 
knew little of such things, had decided to 
take a bath. In they flopped as one, and 
rose to the surface twain. 

And as he dumb the slippery-soapy porce¬ 
lain marge, Angela Bish sank to the bottom 
for the third time, her hopes drowning with 
her. 

How long she stayed there, she never 
knew nor cared. But when she had dried 
her eyes and hair, he had fled. Seldom did 
she see him more. 

From a roll of green cartridge paper she 
fashioned the simple robe in which she fled- 
ded. And all the way home on that Lexing¬ 
ton Avenue car she sadly asked herself, 
“Why? Why? Why?” 

Even thoughtless strangers, usually, as 
you know, so unsympathetic, gazing at her 
ultra-modish garb, and the gobs of paste 
upon her neck and pallid eyebrows, they 
likewise asked themselves, each other, and 
the conductor, “Why?” 



CHAPTER V. 


THE ADVENTURE OF THE PINK PANTALOONS 

O H, browf, but it is cold!” said Angie, 
“browf!—browf!” 

And in simple veritude the poor 
child was frizzified. She was all covered 
with geese flesh; but then, Angela Bish al¬ 
ways was a goose. Anyone is who barks in 
her sleep. 

Nineteen is a terrible age; and the longer 
you’re nineteen the worse it is; neither girli- 
tude nor yet womanability. Angie hated 
to think about it. To think about anything 
at all, in fact, was apt to produce vertigo. 
She had but one idea—it lived in her head 
alone, like a cow in a tree. Its name was 
Get Married. 

For to Angie all men were holy. Some 

had money and some had mastoiditis, but 

she felt sure she could fit right into any 

man’s arms and take root. The only trouble 

was she never had a chance. When men 

saw Angie coming towards them—always at 

a gallop—they usually jumped into a taxi 

55 


56 AIN’T ANGIE AWEUL! 

and gave the chauffeur ten dollars in ad¬ 
vance. 

Now Angie was, at this epoch (if it were 
an epoch, and not a mere spasm), a Collec¬ 
tor of Burnt Matches for the Unsold Spa¬ 
ghetti Company. She got a dollar per 10,- 
000—when she got it. But it is hard work 
collecting burnt matches in Winter, so hard 
that many have given it up in despair the 
very first year, and gone in for First Edi¬ 
tions or Sheffield Plate, instead. It’s es¬ 
pecially hard when you haven’t any friends 
except old ladies who don’t smoke, and use 
only two or three matches a day, for lighting 
the gas stove. 

Working from seven in the morning to a 
similar number p. m. she had, so far, amas¬ 
sed only a scant 5,000. Most of them, be¬ 
sides, were very short and dark complected 
and some had never been anything but 
Swedish matches at best. Not a noble hoard. 
But it was something. Almost anything is. 

With this collection, she set out, one day 
for the Main Office. Boldly she approached 
the President, a man famous for his side 
whiskers, raised under glass. 

“Well, have you 10,000 already?” he 


THE PINK PANTALOONS 57 

asked without looking up from his Ouija 
board. 

“Alas, no—only 5,000,” Angie was forced 
to confess. 

A bobbed hair stenographer smiled. She 
was new at the business, so new that she 
wore no jewelry and went out to the Rest 
Room to powder her ears. She still thought 
spaghettis grew in the smaller Venetian 
canals, and the holes were made by torea¬ 
dors. She gazed at Angie, with much of her 
face open. Too much. 

“Nothing doing!” said the President. 
“And don’t come back till you have 10,000; 
and then don’t. I fear you are infectious. 
Kindly do not breathe until you have left 
town. Wink all you want, but don’t 
breathe.” 

Very, very angry was Angie. She didn’t 
see red, for, among her other accomplish¬ 
ments she was color-blind; but she did bite 
a piece out of the door knob as she left. It 
failed, however, to appease her hunger. She 
was mad all the way home—so mad that 
the train conductor thought seriously of 
muzzling her, but didn’t, on account of the 
expense. 


58 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


So now yon know why Angela Bish, gaz¬ 
ing so violently at the demised fireplace in 
her small apartment, this cold ten o’clock, 
felt so gizzardless and unfastened in the 
small of the back. The temperature was 
far below par, and already Angie’s hair was 
frozen. 

Only 5,000 in six weeks! Why, it would 
have been cheaper she thought to buy new 
matches and burn them herself! More fun, 
too; especially on a day like the aforesaid. 
And wouldn’t they make just as good 
spaghetti as the real ones growing on the 
sidewalk and in the gutters? No one need 
ever know. 

We have spoken of a fireplace, just as if 
Angie was really living. Pardon the pre¬ 
varication. Angie’s room rent had not been 
paid for some time—her landlady said even 
longer—and she was now dwelling in two 
pine packing cases in an alley behind a gar¬ 
age. As only simple portieres of gunny sack¬ 
ing protected her from the curiosity of the 
limousines which prowled about her domi¬ 
cile, she had to be very careful what she ate. 

For many days she had been nourished on 
the paste she begged from benevolent bill- 



THE PINK PANTALOONS 59 


posters, and occasional scrapings from 24- 
sheets of Theda Bara and other highly in¬ 
digestible stars, and she was beginning to 
feel the need of simpler food less exciting 
to a person of her spontaneous tempera¬ 
ment. Still, she was happy enough, except 
for the nail on the floor of the box very near 
where she was most fond of sitting down, 
and a knot hole which had established a 
direct communication between a February 
breeze and her left ear. As she did not 
entertain much company she could keep her 
feet usually in the dining room. 

She had named her new abode “The 
Pines.” 

This rustic tranquillity was bifurcated, 
one tremendous afternoon, by the arrival of 
a pair of pompous pink pantaloons con¬ 
taining one “Mr. Frimp,” a small, smiling 
object surmounted by a shock of longish 
black hair such as is often found on Chinese, 
and the tails of Percheron stallions. 

“Surely,” said Mr. Frimp, holding Angie 
off with one hand, “there is not another 
woman in the world with a face like that. 
Even one is improbable. Two were quite 



60 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


impossible. Then you must be, indeed you 
are, aren’t you, Miss Angela Bish?” 

“I am,” said Angie, as she wildly en¬ 
deavored to suffocate him with her long 
overdue embraces. “But don’t ask why. 
It’s chronic, but I still hope to have my last 
name, at least, cured.” Her hungry eyes 
burned like roasting chestnuts on an Ital¬ 
ian’s frying pan. 

“One moment!” The stranger untied her 
arms from his neck. “What I have to say 
will probably cause acute convulsions, so I 
beg you to be calm. Are you married ?” 

Angie shrieked. “I would give 5,000—” 

“Nor engaged 

“So much indeed am I not so, sir, that 
it has already threatened to run into in¬ 
sanity, if not more so.” 

“Then I love you!” 

Angela swooned. And in her ecstasy, it 
seemed to her that she was drowning in 
French ice cream covered with chocolate 
sauce in a new $90 Paris hat. Such bliss 
sometimes kills; and Angie, her lungs full 
of vanilla and pistachio, w T as going down for 
the third time, when she was slowly but 
fiercely pinched back to life. 


THE PINK PANTALOONS 61 


She was still embracing Mr. Primp, but 
he was gradually removing her with a tire 
iron. 

After tying her securely into her packing 
case, he nailed down the cover securely, 

called it a day, and left. 

****** 

Now lightning may seldom strike twice in 
the same place, but workmen often do. And 
Mr. Frimp was working Angie to a finish. 
He struck hard next day. So hard that 
Angie was as tender as a rump steak after 
treatment with a mallet. But then Angie 
had always been soft. By this time she was 
practically liquid. 

Came days of divine delight to Angela 
Bish, in a world of almost Coney Island 
beauty, with a man she could paw as much 
as she pleased. Came magic hours when for 
days her lips were not removed from his. 
Came Love, in all its transcontinental 
grandeur! 

****** 

Day by day they wandered together along 
the curbstones of the great city, marveling 
at its beautiful cesspools—at the gorgeous 
gutters, where the banana peel grew so lux- 


62 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


uriantly. Or, haply, they strolled towards 
the East Side and reveled in the fragrant 
Portuguese fauna of the slums. 

At night, scaling some lofty fire escape, 
high amongst the milk bottles they would 
together marvel at some heart-broken ger¬ 
anium, alone in the February frosts, or 
smile at the frozen gold fish in a neglected 
bowl of ice. 

It was cold, so cold that even Angie’s 
kisses could not always warm them; but, as 
they sat hand-in-hand on some picturesque 
ash barrel their mutual shivers thrilled them 
to the epiglottis. At least they thrilled 
Angie’s. Mr. Frimp’s were hidden under 
that mop of Japanese black hair. And you 
never can tell what ears will do when you 
take your eyes off them. 

And so love at last had come to Angela 
Bish—love such as poets sing—love such as 
you hear so much of from the hand-organs. 

But, alas, in all the high-class love affairs 

there is always a Joker. 

****** 

The marriage day had come, arriving 
promptly at 12.00, midnight. 

Angie, cutting smart, diagonalized holes 


THE PINK PANTALOONS 63 


d la Doughnut in the fetching white flour 
sack that was to be her wedding dress, open¬ 
ed her sleepified eyes to discover Mr. Frimp 
opening her packing case. 

“Angela,’’ he remarked, “will your love 
be as subsequent as it is previous ?’’ 

Angie frothed at the mouth. 

“I need a little cash tonight/’ Mr. Frimp 
continuated, “and all the banks have gone 
to bed. I cannot afford an automobile for 
our bridal trip, but I can get a really beau¬ 
tiful wheelbarrow cheap. Could you lend 
me a few thousand till tomorrow?” 

A strange sound came from Angie’s ears. 
“Frimp,” she said, at last, “I have only 
seven and a half cents to my name. I earned 
it keeping out of sight of the garbage man. 
I always give him a pain, and tonight, hav¬ 
ing acute indigestion, he couldn’t risk see¬ 
ing me. God knows I need the money for 
the little trifles women love to have on their 
wedding day, but—” 

“You have no money?” gasped Mr. 
Frimp. 

“Not many money—but they are yours!” 

“But that five thousand you told the 
President of the Spaghetti of?” 


64 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


“Five thousand? Ah, yes!” And Angie, 
opening a tin box she always wore about 
her neck, proudfully displayed her precious 
hoard of burnt matches. “I thought, when 
we were married we might stuff a mattress 
with them—” 

But already Mr. Frimp was transformed 
with rage and disappointedness. With one 
scornful gest he had torn off his pink panta¬ 
loons. Blush not, ladies, underneath was a 
purple accordion-plated skirt reaching far, 
far below the hips. Another wrench—like 
a monkey wrench it was—and his coat and 
vest came off, and Angie saw, rather than 
felt, an orange blouse. The silk hat bounced 
off his head; and from it, Mr. no longer, a 
female Frimp extracted a green picture hat 
and set it angrily athwart her head. 

It was now the mercenary stenographer 
from the Spaghetti Company who was no 
longer there. She was borne away on a de¬ 
spairing sigh. And you would sigh, too, 
wouldn’t you, if you had had to keep com¬ 
pany with a whiting like Angie for a month, 
free, and pay your own expenses? 


CHAPTER VI. 


THE ADVENTURE OF THE GRAFOLION 

COMPANY 

F OR a young girl, life in New York is 
hard; so hard as to he practically in¬ 
digestible. There were times when 
Angela Bish didn’t know where her next 
kiss would come from. Other girls fell in 
love, married, were beaten and divorced. 
But none of these blessings were vouchsafed 
Angela. 

Indeed, she had so often been thrown 
down by men that, at the Almost-Fur fac¬ 
tory, where she glued whiskers onto blotting 
paper, to make sealskin coats, they called 
her Angie the Unbreakable. Disappointed 
hopes had turned her hair prematurely yel¬ 
low. 

Ill as she could afford the luxury she 

would have given eight dollars any day for 

a husband, dead or alive. If wealthy, she 

would have preferred him dead. But all 

the matrimonial agencies had given her up 

as too wonderfully willing. Men, they said, 

65 


66 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


kindly, liked to pursue an elusive woman, 
like a cake of soap in a wet bathtub—even 
men did who hated baths. But poor Angie 
began to smile when a man was blocks away, 
and kept it up till the cops asked her if she 
were looking for the Home for the Feeble 
Minded. 

Yet she was fair—at least, fairly fair. 
She would have made a good wife for any 
dead husband. Besides her talent for gum- 
chewing, for which she had received a gold 
medal at the Garbage Collectors’ Annual 
Ball, she had incipient hydrophobia and 
many other accomplishments. But they 
accomplished little in the way of a husband. 

The fact was, Angie was usually sound 
asleep in and around the region between the 
ears, and she woke up only when marriage 
was proposed, usually by herself. Brains 
she had nix. The only answer she knew was 
“Yes”; and that didn’t get her very far 
with the tightwads she knew, unless they 
happened to ask her did she want a trolley 
ride. 

Yet it is always darkest just before Christ¬ 
mas. Even as she pored over the first 
lesson in the Correspondence School of Sui- 


THE GRAFOLION COMPANY 67 


cide, and had about decided to specialize in 
Rough on Rats, Romance was already 
sneaking into her hall bedroom, disguised 
in special delivery. The letter was unsigned, 
but she recognized the perfume as one on 
sale by all the best soapists. 

‘ ‘ Oft, ’ ’ it began—and she smiled. Angela 
liked soft letters, and one that began with 
“oft,” she knew, would be as gooey as the 
inside of a ripe Camembert cheese. 

“Oft have I admired your smart closed 
carriage, your proud boardwalk, the grace¬ 
ful swinging of your gait. They have quite 
run away with my heart, although my liver 
and lungs still remain unmoved. If you care 
to share a little whale and buttermilk at 
Kid’s restaurant tonight with one who 
adores the very tacks you walk on, wire 
Ham-and-eggs, care United Stogie Store, 
No. 1112, Hoboken-on-the-Sewer. I thank 
you. Green Mustache.” 

Hatched in the happiness of her soul, a 
baby hope, no bigger than a Boston baked 
bean, flapped its beak and cawed in ecstasy. 
That day for lunch Angela Bish ate a heavy 
dessert to keep her spirits down. But, all 
the afternoon, the girls at the Almost-Fur 


68 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


factory, seeing her giggle over her glue, 
decided that she must have received the 
happy news of a death in the family. 

She walked to the restaurant as if on 
hair. 

And sure enough his mustache was green; 
and he must have been green himself to 
take Angie so seriously. Few would have 
taken her at all. He held out a hand like 
twenty cents’ worth of bananas, and lifted 
his two-quart hat. 

“Angela,” he said, “long as I have known 
you—and it is now almost a whole minute 
—never have I seen vou more beautiful!” 

%J 

The compliment instantly went to her 
head, and there, in the great dim solemn 
silent spaces, it roamed about like a tailless 
cat in a cathedral. And her smile w r as that 
of one who has just borrowed a $400 squir¬ 
rel coat to be photographed in. That is, if 
there are $400 squirrels. I doubt it. 

She couldn’t eat. Indeed, long as she had 
practised the art, it was all she could do to 
do nothing. But he ate heartily and handily 
and greedily and gaudily in great glorious 
gosh-awful gobs. Like a fireman feeding 
a furnace, his knife went up and down. 


THE GRAFOLION COMPANY 69 



LIKE A FIREMAN FEEDING A FURNACE HIS KNIFE 

WENT UP AND DOWN 





















70 AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


Was it time for the clinch yet? she won¬ 
dered. No, there was still considerable pine¬ 
apple pie on his mustache; and she decided 
to w r ait till he had finished his repast . . . 
at last it was all gone. Angie opened her 
eyes again. 

“Now, little one,” said he, “come along 
with me. We are going to have one of those 
wonder jazz evenings you read about in the 
fifteen cent magazines.” 

This was no news to little Angela, only, 
it wouldn’t be like one of those short stories, 
she had decided; it would be a regular lie- 
and-she serial, as illustrated by an artist 
with-three-names. 

She took his arm, together with every¬ 
thing between his hat and heels, including 
the Flor de 14th St. cigar that was slowly 
turning his green mustache violet. Come 
with him? You couldn’t have melted her 
off with an acetylene blast. She had grown 
on him like a wart or a bad habit, for richer, 
for poorer, for sale or for instance till death 

did them puncture. 

****** 

The hall of the Grafolion Company was 
cold, so cold as to be well-nigh rectangular. 


THE GRAFOLION COMPANY 71 


As he poked her through the transom Angie 
was saying to herself, “Once I get him in 
my arms, nothing shall ever part us except 
marriage!” With her personality and her 
biceps she felt sure that she could hold him 
and his cigar. Poor Angela! She was as 
optimistic as a centipede about to attempt 
to cross a freshly varnished floor. 

And yet, once alone with him—for when 
they went in, his cigar went out—she found, 
somehow, she just couldn’t do it. It was not 
her will that relented, she had made no will. 
It was nothing so petty as pity, nor was it 
the mole on the bow of his nose. No, it was 
only the long overdue fact that she was hand¬ 
cuffed to the wall, and, try as she might, 
with all her might, she could not pull it 
down. She could not even bend it. It was 
lucky for her that she was used to being a 
wallflower. 

I wish I didn’t have to describe the scene 
that followed. But your vulgar curiosity 
must be satisfied. Yet how shall I bring it 
home to you, if you insist upon having a 
ghastly thing like that in your own home? 
I can only say that, when that brute in 
human form approached her as if to kiss 


72 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


and, my gawd! did not kiss, her bloodshot 
shrieks sounded as follows: 

D! pdq *-&Dzp$Bjz!!! AAR D!gdf* 

One would have thought they were dis¬ 
membering a Member of Congress. Her 
screams filled the hall to repletion. 

And still the man she would vamp and 
could not, kept three-eighths of an inch from 
her, his green mustache brushing her nose. 
It was a ticklish situation for Angela. As 
near he was as rent day, yet far away as 
fairyland or the Differential Calculus. She 
never could tell them apart; few can. 

But what, ladies and gentlemen, was the 
most mysterious machine just abaft her 
fore-quarter, whose wheel, the while, was 
revolving with the hellish cruelty of a taxi¬ 
meter taking a girl home to the Bronx? It 
turned on and on. . . . Once she had left 
the water turned on all day in the bathtub. 
This was like that—only the floor was not 
so wet. . . . And as it turned, by her mixed 
groans one might have suspected her to be 
a giraffe with a stiff neck. 

But she was not. She was only a young 
girl growing bilious. And at last, answer¬ 
ing her cries for help, the room rose on one 


THE GRAFOLION COMPANY 73 


corner and bowed politely, then looped the 
loop and did a tailspin. Angela knew no 
more; indeed, not so much. 

****** 

A spoonful of gasoline, forced between 
her lips, revived her; and she was released 
by a red-headed Chinaman. Him she might 
have kissed, perhaps, for Angela’s love was 
usually all-embracing. But it was too late; 
her kisses had staled. The man with the 
green mustache had disappeared. At first 
she thought he had taken her heart with 
him, and felt anxiously inside her corset. 
No, it was not gone, but it was going. 

****** 

Three weeks are supposed by some to have 
elapsed. 

* * * * * * 

Entering a Hall of Records, one day, 
something—it may have been the Recorder 
—told her to ask for the new Catterwaulski 
records, so extensively advertised, of late, 
in all the best fly-papers. She heard, and, 
understanding, at last, thereby established a 
new record of her own for intelligence. Be- 


74 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


fore her ears were reproduced the convulsive 
arpeggios of her late lamented anguish. 

Yea, verily; in the distracted depths of 
Angela’s lovesickness, the Grafolion Com¬ 
pany had discovered a new coloratura con¬ 
tralto. You can get her complete conniption 
on a 12-inch disc for $3.50. 


CHAPTER VII. 


THE ADVENTURE OF THE BILLION DOLLAR 

BILL 

A NGELA Bish was now twenty. 
Doesn’t that make you homesick, 
girls ? Never mind; try to be brave. 
Into all lives some rain must fall—some 
girls must be over thirty. Anyway, if you’re 
not twenty your daughter may be, 

Angie was already five feet long, includ¬ 
ing the two she had to start with, although 
it is true they had chilblains. Still, she was 
a pretty girl, if you didn’t look very hard. 
Her eyes, though small, were plainly visible 
and her mouth was similar to those found 
on some of our best known eaters. Her in¬ 
growing chin, however, was sometimes mis¬ 
taken for a lower lip. 

“My one hope,” Angie’s mother had said, 
as she lay drowning of acute perspiration, 
“is that you won’t be like other girls. I 
want you to make something of yourself, 

Angie dear—something perfect!” And 

75 


76 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


Angie did. She made a perfect fool of her¬ 
self. It was a sacred duty. 

Yes, Angie was by this time so foolish 
that she had never even heard of face 
powder, and had a theory that every decor¬ 
ated woman she met worked in a flour mill. 
Yes, she thought that the tango was a trop¬ 
ical fruit, that jazz was a popular drink and 
that men, when alone, talked only of women. 
She believed everything she saw in the 
movies, except the Norwegian travel pic¬ 
tures. Nobody believes those, of course. In 
the upper apartments of Angie’s head, in 
short, there was Nobody Home. Her brain 
was To Let. Inquire on the premises. But 
nobody did. 

But to realize just how foolish Angie was 
one would have to be a boy octogenarian— 
young enough to understand, and yet old 
enough to believe it. 

The fact is, Angie was neither girl nor 
woman. She wasn’t even a stenographer. 
She was a sort of feminine Bevo, with a 
denatured disposition guaranteed not to in¬ 
toxicate. The more you had of Angie, in 
fact, the soberer you got. Few men had 
ever acquired a appetite for her—it took 


THE BILLION DOLLAR BILL 77 


too long, and always left a yellowish feeling 
in the mouth, as of oakum, okra or mulli¬ 
gatawny. 

And yet, poor thing, her craving for mas¬ 
culine attention amounted almost to ery¬ 
sipelas. At the faintest sign of approval 
Angie would pursue a man madly all the 
way across the Brooklyn Bridge, and then 
break into his house and demand of his wife 
that she sue him for a divorce. 

“You have the children,” she would plead, 
“and you have had him for years. Don’t 
be so selfish—surely it is my turn, now!” 
Nothing could quell her determination but a 
dishpan full of red hot soap suds. For there 
was royal blood in Angie; her grandmother 
had been named Queenie. 

Chilly it was in her bare bedroom, so child¬ 
ishly chilly that the poor girl had to eat the 
coal to keep her warm, even though it always 
gave her coal sores. She was so hungry that 
her feet ached. So, no wonder Angie was 
blue, dark blue! Also, she was getting that 
awful unkissed look that brings out one’s 
freckles so prominently. Her corsets, too, 
had been put on hind side before, that morn¬ 
ing; and when a girl does that, Eddie, you 


78 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


can always make up your mind that she 
has given up hope. 

But we must cheer up and go on. 

Old Gomorrah Bish, Angie’s grandfather 
had just died. Some had believed that he 
would live forever; others thought he had 
already done so. Only once had he ever 
seen Angie; and then he was so spifflified 
that he had thought she was twins. So, in 
his deliritude, he decided to leave her twice 
as much as he had previously planned. He 
had fully intended to leave her nothing. 

But he was so busy dying every day from 
8 a. m. till 5 p. m., with only a half an hour 
off for lunch, that he forgot to leave a will. 
So, as Gomorrah never had had any children 
of his own Angie, his only grandchild was 
his sole heir. 

This very morning her legacy had been re¬ 
ceived by mail. It was a big bright billion 
dollar bill. How Shakespeare would have 
loved that phrase! But oh dear, he will 
never know. 

Why, then, was Angie so unhappy ? One 
doesn’t get a billion dollars, you know, every 
day. Sometimes weeks go by before you 
get it; and even then you don’t, do you? It 


THE BILLION DOLLAR BILL 79 


was so long, in fact, since poor Angie had 
seen a live billion dollar bill that she didn’t 
recognize it. She thought it was a trading 
stamp of some kind—a green trading stamp 
perhaps; certainly not a yellow one. She 
knew that much, anyway. It was no more 
use to her than a stepped-on chocolate drop 
or a subway ticket to Mars. Her dream of 
affluence had grown quite bald; her hopes 
were falling out every day. 

That’s the way it goes in this world, es¬ 
pecially with those whose brains have failed 
to coagulate. Listen: Opportunity knocks 
but once at every one’s door, and then usual¬ 
ly goes right on and delivers the package 
to the wrong address. One girl for instance, 
will be so interested in listening to the 
phonograph that she fails to hear a rich 
Patagonian asking her to marry him, while 
another, a mere elevator girl, perhaps with 
a brass tooth will ring up the President of 
the First National Bank and get him to pro¬ 
pose over the phone, thereby winning $10,- 
000 a year alimony. But for further par¬ 
ticulars see our small booklet. “Love 
Lures.” $1.50 post paid. Send no money. 

And so Angie of the concave intellect, 


80 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


needing a curl paper, twisted up her front 
fetlock in the billion dollar bill, and then 
forgot all about it. But her disappointitude 
she could not forget. She was sore about it 
—as sore as if she had fallen off the top of 
the Woolworth Building at dawn; or pos¬ 
sibly a few hours later. 

Only once that day did Angie smile. It 
was when, in the Subway, a large insurance 
man trod on her foot. But, on watching him 
anxiously-hopeful for the follow-up, she was 
forced to conclude that it had been a mere 
accident. He seemed to be doing it to every¬ 
body. Aren’t men all polygamous? 

The shock gave her a severe heartburn, 
and so she had to hold her foot in her lap 
all the way to Wall Street. From there to 
the Battery, however, the crowd thinned, 
and it wasn’t so embarrassing; she was able 
to rest her shoe on the knees of a Belgian 
Quartermaster with three wound stripes. 

****** 

That forenoon, in the Comfy Underwear 
Factory, as Angela sat sewing buttons on 
the horsehair shirts, the girls saw tears wrig¬ 
gling out of her eyes. But they knew Angie 


THE BILLION DOLLAR BILL 81 


was soft-hearted; she would weep even over 
her boiled eggs, when she found a poor little 
dead birdie inside. So they thought she had 
merely found another gray hair that day— 
possibly in her soup—and went right on 
chewing gum. 

So fast came the tears that she could 
scarcely see, that afternoon, to fasten the 
wire netting in the seats of the celebrated 
Will wear Underwear. Ah, yes, there are 
often tragedies, dear reader, woven into the 
most inconspicuous portions of your geo¬ 
graphy. Little you know, when you sit down 
to your happy meal—but let that pass! It is 
too horrible. One sees so many tragedies 
in the movies what’s the good of having 
them in real life! 

****** 

As the chickens were coming home to roost 
on Broadway, that evening, Angie was 
standing disconsolately on the corner of 
Madison Square voraciously eating the 
steam from a roasted peanut machine—it 
was all she could afford for dinner. As she 
waited idly, wondering why blondes would 
wear red hats, a beautiful whiskery gentle- 


82 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


man gravely approached her from the op¬ 
posite direction to that in which she was 
eating. As he raised his silk hat, he was 
gnawing his mustache, and his sad smile 
smelt of licorice. 

“Lady,” said he, “if indeed you are one, 
pardon me; but you look so much like that 
small, elongated musteloid carnivore known 
as the Putorius vulgaris that from across the 
street I thought you were a weasel; or per- 
adventure you are only Welsh. Would you 
kindly give me your name'?” 

He put on his hat, ate a few more mus¬ 
tache, and bowed politely. 

Angie not only gave him her name, but a 
look that made him smile into his mirror 
for the rest of his life. For he perceived by 
her expression that her brain had been thor¬ 
oughly sterilized after all thinks had been 
removed from the shell. All, that is, save 
one, her favorite whim. She gave her name, 
in words of one syllable, as if broadcasting 
from XYZ. 

“And now,” she concluded, “won’t you 
return the compliment and give me your 
name too—for keeps?” 

This was the proper form of proposal, 


THE BILLION DOLLAR BILL 83 


an aged colored psychic lady had once in¬ 
formed her, to address to a gent with sali¬ 
vated whiskers. 

“Come with me/ 7 said the stranger, for 
such he appeared to be, “I feel that you are 
to bring a great rectangular blessing into 
my life—it will be a debt I can never repay 
—I shall not even try to. For such as you 
I have long longed, longing. 77 

And he was right. To meet a girl at once 
rich and foolish—what man can have a 
greater ambition! 

Once in the garlic atmosphere of Madison 
Square, however, amongst the tulips and 
bootblacks, his tone dropped several stitches. 
He seemed much colder. But then, not only 
was he sitting on a stone bench, but he 
was still guilty of wearing summer under¬ 
wear. He looked her sternly in the hair. 

“Woman/ 7 he said, at last, “I cannot 
marry you. You smoke! 7 7 

In vain Angie denied it. It was only 
steam, she protested, that was coming from 
her mouth in the cold air. And on her 
fingers the yellow stains were merely bilious. 

Frowning he shook his teeth and pointed 
to the curl athwart her brow. “Why, your 


84 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


very hair is curled with a Cigar Stores Cer¬ 
tificate!” he exclaimed, “and the lips that 
touch Egyptians shall never touch mine; 
and the same goes for Turkey, Havana and 
Virginia and Porto Rico.” With a cour¬ 
teous gesture he tore the billion dollar bill 
from her head, put it into his vest pocket 
and fastened it with a hair pin. 

It was for this alone he had lured her 
so far into the metropolis. Ah, yes, such 
things are done every day. 

In another minute he was on board a 
Broadway car, laughing like a man who has 
just heard his divorced wife has married 
again. 

****** 

But as the poet says, “ ’Tis better to have 
loved and lost, than never to have lost at 
all.” Angie could tell her grandchildren 
that one man had at least taken an option 
on her. To one man she had given her All. 

That is, if she ever had any grandchildren. 
But to Angela Bish they seemed to be get¬ 
ting scarcer every day! 


CHAPTER VIII. 


THE ADVENTURE OF THE DUMB DECEIVER 

A T twenty-one, most girls you know 
know little, so little they little know 
how little they know. If you don’t 
believe this, try it on your piano. Angela 
Bish inherited her double-zero intellect 
from her father who, before his vaccination 
was a middle-aged mud-eater of the Orinoco. 
However little she knew, however, she knew 
she knew little. And this she had acquired 
by painful inexperience. 

Angie had never thought of anything less 
important than marriage, if anything can 
be less important. But marriage had never 
taken Angie seriously. It had never taken 
her at all. It had only winked at her, like 
a blueheaded fireman on a hose cart, as it 
hurtled past. 

And yet Angie wasn’t bad looking, really. 

Why should she be ? She wasn’t really bad. 

Her black eyes curled naturally, and her 

hair was heavily plated with gold. Why 

then did men shun her as if she were taking 

85 




86 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


* 



IT WAS AN UNEASY SEASICK FEELING THAT 
THERE WAS SOMEBODY UNDER THE BED 






THE DUMB DECEIVER 


87 


up a collection for the Crown Prince? In 
the endeavor to solve this mystery she went 
to great lengths, often as far as Flatbush, 
in the pursuit of a man—only to have him 
turn at bay and bite her in the elbow. 

One day, and, curiously enough it happens 
to be the very day of which we are speaking, 
Angie awoke with a presentiment that her 
luck had changed. It wasn’t merely that 
she found a comforter on the bed with her. 
She was used to that; and besides, its patch- 
work was too old and ragged to comfort her 
any longer. No, it w T as an uneasy, seasick 
feeling that there was somebody under the 
bed. Why, otherwise, should her mattress 
be heaving up and down as if she were cross¬ 
ing the English Channel in a bathtub ? Also, 
strange, muffled sounds came from amid¬ 
ships, and the springs sprang, as if Father 
were searching for a collar button or a lost 
will. 

Now, although to Angie it all seemed too 
good to be true, the prudish may consider 
it too true to be good. But, at all events, 
the facts, like the person under the bed, 
must come out. And so, after removing a 
few old shoes, an adding machine and a cat’s 


88 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


coffin, Angie beheld grinning at her a hand¬ 
some face and foot. At least he was hand¬ 
some to Angie—any man would be, were he 
grinning at her. Usually they frowned and 
asked her bitterly if she were a relic of the 
Great War. 

Despite the happiness that had thus come 


HAEDLY A PROPER COSTUME IN WHICH TO 
RECEIVE GENTLEMEN AT 7 A.M. 

into her life, Angela was in a quandary— 
hardly a proper costume in which to receive 
gentlemen at seven a. m. She felt it quite 
too early to reveal the bare facts of her 
simple life. Luckily, however, unless the 
gentleman under the bed had a periscope she 
was comparatively safe from observation, 


























THE DUMB DECEIVER 


89 


except for her feet. They were superlatively 
safe, for, having water on the knees, Angie 
always wore rubber boots to bed. 

In the twinkling of an ear she had dis¬ 
guised her true self in an inveterate green 
kimono, and she was ready to explore the 
fastnesses of the hall bedroom. But Angela 
was proud, though practical. Would she 
stoop to coax him forth? Not she. She lay 
flat on her turn. The poor girl who had had 
few opportunities in her life to pull a man’s 
leg now eagerly embraced the opportunity 
and a pair of brilliant trousers. Out they 
came, and a body, several arms and the grin 
with them. But the excitement was too great 
for a girl already weakened by hangnails, 
and for a time she feared that she would be 
prostrated by the violent attack of goose- 
flesh she now enjoyed. 

The foregoing events occurred in far less 
time than it has taken me to tell them; but, 
you see, they were in a hurry. I am not. 

Her visitor, for such, upon investigation, 
he proved to be, wore an officer’s uniform. 
If he were not a colonel he was at least a 
nut. Notwithstanding the fact that bright 
red trousers and cast iron collars are not 


90 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


being worn with bine embroidered jackets 
this season, he seemed to Angie to be a 
gentleman. True, he wore no shoes, but so 
long as he kept two feet away from her she 
didn’t mind. 

The elegant and refined way in which he 
sucked a tube of tooth paste she offered him, 
showed careful breeding; and, when he ac¬ 
cepted the cold cream, Angie was pleased to 
observe that he did not eat it with his fing¬ 
ers. Tie used his mouth, with the occasional 
aid of a few toes and a shoe horn to get out 
the very last of it. 

This at last finished, Angie presented him 
with a cigar. It was practically a new one, 
never having been smoked but once. 

But talk he simply would not. He was as 
devoid of conversation as an American In¬ 
dian having his tonsils filled. What cared 
Angela! Blissfully she squatted on her 
single-barrelled bed; and, as he idly dipped 
her switch in the mucilage and smiled up 
sympathetically, she told her new-found 
friend of her trials and convictions at the 
Artificial Egg factory where she now work¬ 
ed; and how, every day, when the eggs were 
shelled, she aged them for the market, escort- 


THE DUMB DECEIVER 


91 


ing the young and giddy ones to public ban¬ 
quets and musical comedies to give them 
that world-weary flavor which made them 
feel so thoroughly at home on a slice of fried 
restaurant ham. 

Yes, for the first time that day Angie was 
falling in love. Cast no aspirin upon her, 
dear reader. She had no mother to guide 
her and caution her never to marry a man 
who didn’t keep a Ford and a butler. She 
was only a poor working girl into whose life 
there had come an unexpected gleam of 
raspberry, whose little heart was tingling, 
like a telephone bell ringing, ringing the 
wrong number. She was fond and foolish 
and freckled; and such, beloved brethren, 
are ever the victims of the bounder and the 
book agent. Thus endeth the First Lesson. 

But we are getting away from the hand¬ 
some stranger, something which Angie cer¬ 
tainly was not. She had not only fallen in 
love, but into his arms. 

He seemed to take her entree as a matter 
of course, and said nothing in some strange 
guttural language. But, by the twitching 
of his huge Transylvanian ears, Angie was 
aware that he was running a temperature. 


92 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


For several minutes nobody breathed in 
the room. 

Outside, the little birds on the telegraph 
wires looked in at the moving picture and 
smiled at one another. Some even wept. 
Then they flew down into the street and 
simply raved over a stale pretzel, ten days 
dead. That just shows how shallow and un¬ 
feeling birds are. They don’t really care. 

But if I don’t separate my two lovers 
pretty quickly, the infuriated man charging 
upstairs certainly will. For his charges are 
getting higher and higher; and he is now at 
the top floor. 

****** 

As Angie came up for air she saw, stand¬ 
ing in and about the doorway a human Hin- 
denburg, as ugly as a restaurant waiter pre¬ 
senting a check for $17.75. He was in a fury 
and a plaid suit. 

“Mungo, come here!” 

His master’s voice! Angela’s sweetheart 
shrivelled like a quail on toast. For a mo¬ 
ment, as he stood there, his small brown eyes 
shining like half-gone coughdrops, she 
thought he would prove himself a man. Her 
hero! But, catching sight of a slender grace- 



THE DUMB DECEIVER 


93 


ful form concealed behind the intruder, his 
devotion began to bag at the knees, and 
finally, tempted beyond his appetite, he sur¬ 
rendered. 

A pang of jealousy, hot as a Mohammedan 
hell, smote Angela. So she had a rival— 
and, of course, a blonde! One of the only 
gents she had ever loved had left her; for a 
banana. Not even for a red one, either, just 
an ordinary yellow three-for-ten! How ter¬ 
ribly men’s passions could sway them! 

Yet she would not give him up; she could 
not. “You shall not take him from me,” 
she wailed, “as if he were merely measles! 
I love him! I found him under the bed and 
he is mine!” Her gestures were almost im¬ 
probable. 

But the stern intruder, being a Vaudeville 
manager, knew, of course, how to act. Snap! 
The fetters were fastened to our handsome 
hero’s collar. 

“And now, young woman,” said he, with 
grotesque variations in D natural, “you’ll 
have to come along with me, too! It’s no 
use weeping, I am stone deaf. I’m going 
to have you sent up for trying to steal my 
trained chimpanzee! ’ ’ 


94 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


It was in the cool cloisters of the County 
Jail, therefore, that Angela Bish realized 
how little she knew—especially of men. 
Again her heavy heart had caused her to 
turn turtle dove. But although her life and 
her cheeks had grown colorless, she did not 
repaint. The love light had faded from her 
eyes; hut then, she could wear tortoise shell 
spectacles. 

No, her love affair had proved quite other¬ 
wise, but everyone had a flivver, nowadays; 
and, after all, what was life without a few 
regrets'? She didn’t know. She didn’t even 
know what life was with them. The things 
Angie didn’t know were increasing every 
day. 


CHAPTER IX. 


THE ADVENTURE OF THE MOZAMBIQUE 

MONKEYS 

N OBODY loves me!” How many a 
maid has wailed the words, or vainly 
tried to scratch them on the window 
pane with her $4.50 rhinestone ring. 

“Nobody loves me!” The saddest ex¬ 
clamation in any language including the 
Scandinavian, excepting “Please Remit!” 

“Nobody loves me!” So wept Angela 
Bish, and it was true. Nobody but the flies, 
the mosquitoes. For the heat was hot on 
Avenue B; and her bedroom seemed more 
full of bed than usual—bed and hairpins. 
And on the wall paper the eczema seemed to 
be getting worse. About the bureau it was 
quite, quite bald. 

Lonely? Angie yearned and yawned for 
male society with the ravenous appetite of a 
man-eating shark. But men were shy of 
Angie; very shy, for men. They got rid of 
her quickly, as if she were a lead quarter. 
Yes, Angie was full of lonelitude. What 

95 


96 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


she wanted was Someone to murmur soft, 
sweet, sticky things in her hair, and to let 
her lay her loving skull on his vest pocket 
beside the fountain pen—His fountain pen! 
—while, in the gloaming, they read together 
“How to be Happy, though Sober.” 

This was her dream; but alas, dreams go. 
And when they go, they usually go by con¬ 
traries. And so, Angie had long been sav¬ 
ing up for a phonograph. That seemed to 
be the only virtuous way she could ever be 
thrilled by hearing a smooth-shaven voice 
passionately baritoning to her “You are the 
very gooiest girl in all the glad New York!” 

In her fond impatience she had already 
purchased this classic song-record; and she 
had thirty-one cents saved up in her mus¬ 
tache cup for the phonograph. Often, in 
the longing, lingering evenings, she sadly 
attempted to play the disc herself with a 
cambric needle. But it was unsatisfactory. 
Finally, in despair, she threw it out the win¬ 
dow, and hit a Scandinavian tinsmith. He 
seemed to be so much struck by her that it 
consoled her a little. 

But not much. Melancholy came back 
with the mosquitoes, both male and female. 


THE MOZAMBIQUE MONKEYS 97 

Yet how dangerous it is to meddle with Fate! 
In Angela’s anguish she had said she wanted 
to die; and the very next day, sure enough, 
she was tickled to death. For when, after 
washing her hands, she started to wipe them 
on the evening paper that she had always 
found so dry, lo, her eyes fell on these glad 
tidings, under the heading, “Girls Wanted ; 
Female ” 

J IMP Girlene wanted with bow legs to play on 
harp with toes. Apply B. Squimp, Cafe Noir. 

TuThuSat3t. 

Angie burst into a loud smile. Why, she 
was made for the place! Her mirror had 
told her so confidentially many a time, as old 
friends will, when the news is disagreeable. 
And didn’t she dimly recall when a mere 
baby having played with her toes ? Surely 
with a little practice and a pair of violet 
stockings she could do it again. 

She happened, at present, to be just out of 
harps, but she sat down and tried a few 
minor chords on the radiator, and succeeded 
in eliciting considerable applause from the 
retired bean-boiler in the next room. That 
is, she thought it was applause till the cus- 


98 


AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


pidor came sailing through the transom. 
Even the undertaker on the ground floor tip¬ 
toed up in black gloves to tell her that she 
was interfering with his business. She was 
making noise enough, he said, to awaken the 
dead. So Angie played on in diminished 
thirds. 

Bright and early that evening, when moon 
and men were full, she interviewed B. 



FINDING THAT SHE COULD HIDE THE HARP 


SAFELY HE SET HER RIGHT TO WORK 















THE MOZAMBIQUE MONKEYS 99 


Squimp, who was as silent as if clams had 
suddenly taken place. Finding, however, 
that she could ride the harp safely, he set 
Angie right to work jazzing with his or¬ 
chestra of Manicured Mozambique Monkeys. 

Angie’s luck at last had turned. But don’t 
get excited about it—that’s not always a 
good sign. Milk often turns, too, and no¬ 
body gives three cheers about it. 

But it was wonderful, when she began to 
play, how sure-footed she was! Her harp 
seemed half human, half divine. As for 
Angie, she seemed half human, half monkey. 
How merrily she leaped from string to 
string! How her toes twinkled, as she ran 
from chord to chord, and vice versa. Soon 
she was the pedicure of all eyes. For Angela, 
though only faintly pretty, had a beautiful 
sole. True, it was somewhat blistered; but, 
at such a time even fallen arches are beau¬ 
tiful. Look at the Temple of Diocletian, for 
instance. 

What cared Angie, then, though she had 
worn the skin off eleven or twelve toes! Had 
not men acclaimed her daring feet? Why, 
even the Mozambique Monkeys were telling 
their tails of her skill! 


t 

) 


> ■> 


100 AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


Lame but happy, Angie tottered home. If 
she had been friends with the undertaker 
she would have asked him to embalm her 
feet; they felt like hot Frankfurters with 
mustard. You must have seen them—Frank¬ 
furters—but think of being them! But 
Angie fell asleep and dreamed that she was 
married to a Chilean chiropodist who made 
her dance on sandpaper. At the beatified 
expression of her face and neck the mosqui¬ 
toes laughed heartily, all night long. 

But, no matter how happy a Thursday 
may be, the next day is sure to be Friday. 
Angie’s toes were still so rare that she was 
forced to crawl to the Cafe Noir on her 
hands and knees. She felt a bit conspicu¬ 
ous, but no one had ever noticed her before, 
and she was touched. Many people touched 
her. Benevolent old gentlemen in fur col¬ 
lars poked kindly at her with their canes and 
w r ept. “Somebody’s daughter, perhaps/’ 
they said, “who knows!” Then they step¬ 
ped over her and went their way. 

She w r as somewhat annoyed, however, 
when crossing the street, by the way full 
grown automobiles strolled across her spine. 
It hurt her to think they could be so hard 


THE MOZAMBIQUE MONKEYS 101 



“SOMEBODY’S DAUGHTER PERHAPS,” THEY SAID, 

“WHO KNOWS” 


and careless. Even when they were mere 
Fords it hurt her. 

The Manicured Mozambiques had already 
grown very fond of Angie, and when she 
arrived, so picturesque in mud and blushes, 
they did their best to make her feel at home. 





102 AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


The leader, an elderly ape, placed in her 
chair a nice, comfortable cushion—it was of 
fly paper with the soft side up—and the 
trombone hospitably offered her a peanut. 



When Angie bit it open, she found it stuffed 
with a toothsome but energetic black beetle. 
But, despite her fatigue, Angie was not 
hungry. 

Little things like that, however, show how 
even the higher mammals can be affected by 
innocence and idiocy and other things with 
small black i’s like Angie’s. It is a beautiful 
thought, but beautiful thoughts are like 
church steeples—one cannot dwell on them 
long. 

Have you ever, dear reader, met a person 




THE MOZAMBIQUE MONKEYS 103 


you seem to have known before in some 
strange, mysterious existence—before you 
were divorced, perhaps, or when you were 
in jail, or living in Chicago? It gives you 
eerie chilblains up and down your spine, as 
if some one were walking on your cradle. 
Well, Angie had such a feeling, that night, 
when she looked at the gentleman in green 
burlap opposite her. He was thinking, and 
winking, and drinking mucilage through a 
quill. 

At first she thought she was attracted to 
him merely because he was throwing kisses 
at her—kisses and spaghetti—you know how 
that always intrigues one—but later she was 
sure that either he was her Affinity, or else 
she owed him money—perhaps both. It gave 
her a sweetly uncomfortable embarrassment, 
like that of an Episcopal clergyman who 
finds his pockets filled with molasses. 

When, however, at 3 a. m., he followed her 
out of the Cafe, wildly beckoning, she knew 
he was after her. The very way he grabbed 
her arm told her that he was one who would 
not hesitate to lay hands upon her if he 
dared. 

She turned upon him like a fish hook, like 


104 AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


a piece of sewing silk when a man tries to 
thread a needle. But in her heart, she was 
already crying “Kamerad!” Already she 
could see their marriage certificate framed 
in a decoration of dropsical cupids, and her 
name spelled wrong . . . she eould hear her¬ 
self replying, “You bet I will!” . . . She 
closed her eyes "with both hands. . . . Per¬ 
haps . . . Perhaps, to their happy Hoboken 
home, with a live linoleum in the kitchen, 
and quartered oak carpets, Little Children 
might come to bless them—and have mumps 
—and pour hot chocolate into the grand 
piano . . . perhaps . . . per . . . 

“Fly with me!” 

Then it was true—true! Every girl who 
has ever been abducted or has been to the 
movies, knows that delicious alarm. It is 
much like bathing in champagne for the first 
time; one doesn’t know whether one will be 
drunk, or drowned. One is aware only of 
the expense. So Angie struggled, and was 
struggled at . . . until a red table cloth was 
thrown over her head, and she was intoxified 
by love. Then all was dark—as dark as the 
inside of a lead pencil. 


THE MOZAMBIQUE MONKEYS 105 


Angie was dreaming she was being kissed 
by Lloyd George, when she was awakened by 
a fly philandering across her upper lip. She 
was alone in a circus tent with her captor 
and the fly. The latter she instantly recog¬ 
nized as one she had known quite intimately, 
on Avenue B. The former was just as un¬ 
known as usual. The heat was intense, as 
it sometimes is in tents; and somewhere in 
the middle distance she could distinctly hear 
a Fat Woman eating cream with a ladle. A 
clock struck Four. Angie felt that it was 
long past three o ’clock. 

“Where were you born?” demanded he to 
which we have already referred. 

This was a strange question, thought 
Angie. Some, indeed, had asked her When 
she was born, but most asked merely Why. 
She was a strange girl, especially to strang¬ 
ers. 

“In Mozambique?” 

Angie trembled like a guava jelly. But she 
could not tell a lie; no one can with a mouth 
full of table cloth. 

“Come here!” He fairly uttered the 
words. And then, seizing her hand, he 


106 AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


gazed at it like a palmist giving a fifty-cent 
reading. But not so lovingly. 

“My word,” lie exclaimed, at last, “you 
are not manicured! Have you got the face 
to say you are not a monkey—and with that 
face?” 

With a pitiful slob the proprietor of the 
Side Show of Freaks rushed out of the tent, 
leaving it there with Angie and the fly. For 
a moment the Fat Woman stopped eating, 
and even the fly turned pale. . . . 

And Angie, poor Angie, so thusly duped, 
gazing sadly at her finger nails, so rich in 
real estate, realized too late that the way to 
a man’s heart is through the Beauty Parlor. 

For no man could make a monkey of 
Angie; she hadn’t enough brains. And be¬ 
sides, monkeys, like poets, are born, not 
made. 


i 




CHAPTER X. 

THE ADVENTURE OF THE TEMPORARY 

HUSBAND 

M AN’S age is of man’s life a thing 
apart; ’tis woman’s whole exis¬ 
tence.” Thus saith the poet and 
thus saith I. The three years that Angela 
Bish was twenty-three were the happiest in 
her life. But as this didn’t happen till she 
was twenty-nine we can’t tell about it now. 
For Angie was now much younger than she 
was at twenty-three. She was only twenty- 
four. 

And still Angie was unwed. She didn’t, 
in fact, have a single husband. But who 
wants one that is single, anyway? Other 
girls had married again and again and 
again. Angie had never had a nibble to her 
name. 

I see a lady in the rear of the room rais¬ 
ing her hand. Why not? you ask. Well, 
you see, Angie was one of those feverish 
females who turn into a quivering jelly upon 

seeing a man, with whipped cream on top. 

107 




108 AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


She was so sweet that after one taste of her 
you had to rush right off and eat sand. When 
she met a man she was so soft that she al¬ 
most ran. The man ran, also. 

Yet Angie was pretty enough, too. She 
had a mild Alderney expression on her face 
that was very restful. You always felt that 
she was just about to moo. But she never 
did; that was perhaps her only charm. 

Only once in her life had Angie been 
kissed. The perpetraitor had been imme¬ 
diately removed to the Psychopathic Ward 
and treated with chopped ice; but to Angela 
Bish the event was so solemn and holy that 
she had not washed that kiss off her lips for 
a month, and on that last day you could dis¬ 
tinctly see twenty-eight coffee rings sur¬ 
rounding her mouth. 

One kiss in twenty-four years works out 
to about 1-8760 of a kiss per day. Now, no 
girl can live on such a pittance—at least, 
not in New York. She is bound to show 
traces of malnutrition, even if it doesn’t 
eventually run into glanders or the Willies. 
The effect upon Angie was terrible. She 
couldn’t use a telephone unless a man had 
recently pressed his moustache against the 


THE TEMPORARY HUSBAND 109 


mouthpiece. It made her ill. She had to 
use a moustache cup for eating her soup. 

Are there any more questions? No?— 
then we must proceed with our tale, like a 
mouse or a zebra. 

The most beautiful things about Angie, 
except her wonderful capacity for being 
married, were her appetite and her hope. 
She had, the day before the story com¬ 
mences—yes, it has really commenced, at 
last—demonstrated both of these qualities 
by inserting the following advertisement in 
the evening paper, under the heading Male 
Help Wanted. 

WANTED, A HUSBAND. Apply in person, 
to A. Bish, 2001 Avenue B., between 6 o’clock. 

Only experienced men desired. No Chinamen. 

And outside her door she had pinned a 
Notice: Line Forms to Right. 

But alas, husbands don’t come as easily as 
that, do they, Lillian? One can’t telephone 
for them and have them delivered C. O. D. 
wrapped in waxed paper in a neat box. One 
has to go out and catch them, like alligators 
or colds. But Angie didn’t know. She 
really didn’t know anything about Life, ex¬ 
cept what she saw on picture post cards. 


110 AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


She was just a Nice Girl, with a few ade¬ 
noids. 

So Angie waited—and what is more 
pathetic than a waitress! 

So Angela waited, also, manicuring her 
teeth, and counting her fingers, never quite 
able to decide whether or not she had made 
a mistake in the total. 

So waited Angela Bish, waited while she 
seemed to see her youth departing, softly, 
silently, like a hall roomer who hasn’t paid 
his rent. 

Came a day (we’re not saying “there 
came” this season) when Angie decided to 
open her last package of cyanide—when— 
when—a knock on her chamber door sent 
her blood pressure up to 313. 

“Yes!” Instinctively Angie had yelled 
it out before he had had time to change his 
mind, if he had had one. That day she 
would have.married any man, or any day. 
She would have married anyone who was 
even partly a man—a mandrake, or amanu¬ 
ensis. 

Now I suppose, dear little reader, you are 
smiling and expecting some rich, handsome 
marcelled hero to enter. Well, so was Angie. 


THE TEMPORARY HUSBAND 111 


Her semi-tropical fancy had already pic¬ 
tured him, a baby grand Chesterfield, richly 
upholstered in Scotch tweeds, with, per¬ 
haps, if it wasn’t hoping too much, carved 
Louis XIV legs. He would have semi¬ 
circular eyebrows and be a Marathon, non¬ 
stop kissist and convincing cuddler. 

Together in the gloaming, Oh, my Darling, 
they would jointly and severally entwine 
upon the cosy couch, and talk fudge talk and 
doll’s dialect till their arteries began to 
harden. / 

But, oh dear! You know how different 
real life is to what it would be if it were not 
different. The door opened, and something 
entered. Reader, close your eyes. It was 
chubby, and talked as if his epiglottis was 
full of cabinet pudding—or even stewed 
bananas. At sight of his pale blue necktie, 
in Angie’s heart mortification had already 
set in. But Angie was brave, and the blood 
twinkled in her veins. After all, a husband 
was always a husband, even when he lisped. 

“I would like,” he said, if indeed we must 
call him he, which we really must, tempo¬ 
rarily, at least, “I would like to find a female 
with a lavender soul!” 


112 AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


“What colored sole ?” Angie asked, dread¬ 
fully. 

“Lavender.” 

Hoping against hope, Angie meditative¬ 
ly took off one slipper. But what color her 
sole proved to be, I hesitate to say. Yet it 
was not lavender; I’m terribly sure of that. 
Angie’s stockings, you see, were rather 
scarcely, that week, and besides she had 
been for hours absent-mindedly wandering 
about in the coal bin, trying to find a pet 
poached egg. And even the Duchess of 
Westminster, you know, might have got a 
little dusty, mightn’t she not have might? 

Angie’s visitor looked modestly away. He 
hadn’t been so shocked since a missionary 
had told him that there were savage tribes 
in Central Africa who had never been mani¬ 
cured. 

“Not the soul of your foot,” he explained, 
“What I want to see, my dear, is your 
psychic self. That’s the current slang you 
know, for your inmost ego.” 

“I had ’em all pulled out,” said Angie, 
“when I was sixteen. They gave me cank¬ 
ers. Don’t you think marriage is a beau¬ 
tiful disease?” 


THE TEMPORARY HUSBAND 113 


Her caller pretended to blow his nose. He 
was really surreptitiously powdering it with 
a marshmallow. You never can tell, now¬ 
adays. And as he proceeded, he watched 
the girl closely. 

“You are far from beautiful,” he admit¬ 
ted; “your face is on wrong. Your eyes 
are poorly fenestrated, and there is some¬ 
thing about your general nasal expression 
that—you aren’t seasick are you, or any¬ 
thing, are you, Miss Bish?” 

Angie wasn’t interested in anything 

female, including herself. All she wanted 
was to glue her lips to a man’s and see what 

happened. But it never did, and so, what 
Angie wanted to know was, When were they 
going to be married? She said as much. 
More. Much more. Much. 

“I could make you beautiful,” it was now 
saying. “Build up a semblance of chin, re¬ 
arrange your nose, blow up your eyes and 
—let’s see, two or three coats of rose-pink 
and a good varnish—one of those you can 
pour boiling water on, you know, and after 
sandpapering your cheeks down to a shape¬ 
ly curve—oh, Miss Bish, how I have longed 
to see what I could do with a really ugly 


114 AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


face! How I could improve it, dress it, 
decorate it to attune with your soul!” 

Angie barely listened. She was thinking, 
When' he is once my husband nothing shall 
part us except jury duty. But, you know 
how it is, sometimes, in the midst of one’s 
wildest yearning, when all one’s being is be¬ 
ing wafted heavenwards, as on the wings of 
doves, something, a mere flea, perhaps, or a 
relapse of hay fever will suddenly bite you 
on the shoulder. What was it he had said ? 
A word came back, like a cat left behind 
when you go to the country ... a word . . . 
“decorate” . . . ’twas full of sinister mean¬ 
ing. 

“What are vou?” she demanded. “In 

%/ 

heaven’s name, speak! Let me know the 
worst before I phone for the minister for 
first aid. Decorate ? Did vou sav decorate ? 

t j 

Speak, before we are harnessed for life!” 

The being smiled. “Why yes,” said he. 
“Of course. Whv not? I am an Interior 

4 / 

Decorator!” 

“Good heavens! And I thought you were 
a man!” 

Angela Bisli had fainted all over the wash 
stand. . . . 


THE TEMPORARY HUSBAND 115 


Twenty years are supposed to have 
elapsed. Supposed, that is, by you and me, 
dear reader. Not by Angie. She had no 
idea that she was now nearing forty-five; 
no idea that anyone knew it. No one does. 
In her madness she still thought of herself 
as a young girl. 

Now, in twenty years many things may 
happen. But nothing had. To be sure, 
several men had entered her life, but upon 
seeing her, they had left hurriedly by a rear 
window. Still she pursued them, still they 
escaped. Still she smiled, and hoped anew, 
like a man searching an oyster stew for the 
oyster. 

For the fact was, the sad fact, if you look 
at it that way, Angela Bish was insane. The 
shock had completely unsettled her reason. 

But there is always a compensation for all 
misfortunes. In her present state everyone 
says that she is far, far more intelligent 
than when she was really sane. Life, now, 
is one long lucid interval. She has perfect 
peace—and so do the men. She has a fond 
delusion. Angie believes that she is married. 
She is sure of it. So much so, that every 
man she sees seems to be her husband, try- 


116 AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL! 


ing to escape. And, as husbands are always 
trying to escape, perhaps Angie may be 
right, after all! 


THE END 







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